How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(7)
Catherine Coleman, along with my Grandma Pudding, and David Rozier’s grandmother, have never been allowed to just be victims. They’re rarely even allowed to be Americans. They don’t get invited to panel discussions. They aren’t talked to by the DNC or RNC. No one asks them what to do about national violence, debt, or defense. They are not American super-women, but they are the best of Americans. They have remained responsible, critical, and loving in the face of servitude, sexual assault, segregation, poverty, and psychological violence. They have done this hard, messy work because they were committed to life and justice, and so we all might live more responsibly tomorrow.
There is a price to pay for ducking responsibility, for clinging to the worst of us, for harboring a warped innocence. There is an even greater price to pay for ignoring, demeaning, and unfairly burdening those Americans who have disproportionately borne the weight of American irresponsibility for so long. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers have paid more than their fair share, and our nation owes them and their children, and their children’s children, a lifetime of healthy choices and second chances. That would be responsible.
***
When David Rozier came back to school the day after we were kicked out, he started playing this game where he would fart every time Henry mispronounced “strong” like “skrong,” and “straight” like “skraight.” David had me dying! I put my head down on my desk so I wouldn’t get kicked out of school again and laughed into my forearm until I cried.
At recess, I asked David, “What happened to all that responsibility you were talking about?”
“Oh,” he said and took off running a post pattern in the schoolyard. “Nigga, that was yesterday!”
I threw David a bomb, and as the ball half-spiraled through the air, neither one of us thought about tomorrow or yesterday. We were just happy to be in the moment, happy to be alive.
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
I’VE HAD GUNS PULLED ON ME BY FOUR PEOPLE under Central Mississippi skies—once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother, and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I’ve helped many folks say yes to life, but I’ve definitely aided in a few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.
***
I’m seventeen, five years younger than Rekia Boyd will be when she is shot in the head by an off-duty police officer in Chicago in 2012. It’s the summer after I graduated high school and my teammate, Troy, is back in Jackson, Mississippi. Troy, who plays college ball in Florida, asks me if I want to go to McDonald’s on I-55.
As Troy, Cleta, Leighton, and I walk out of McDonald’s, I hold the door for open for a tiny, scruffy-faced white man with a green John Deere hat on.
“Thanks, partner,” he says.
A few minutes later, we’re driving down I-55 when John Deere drives up and lowers his window. I figure that he wants to say something funny since we’d had a cordial moment at McDonald’s. As soon as I roll my window down, the man screams, “Nigger lovers!” and speeds off.
On I-55, we pull up beside John Deere and I’m throwing finger-signs, calling John Deere all kinds of clever “motherfuckers.” The dude slows down and gets behind us. I turn around, hoping he pulls over.
Nope.
John Deere pulls out a police siren and places it on top of his car. Troy is cussing my ass out and frantically trying to drive his mama’s Lincoln away from John Deere. My heart is pounding out of my chest—not out of fear, but because I want a chance to choke the shit out of John Deere. I can’t think of any other way of making him feel what we felt.
Troy drives into his apartment complex and parks his mama’s long Lincoln under some kind of shed. Everyone in the car is slumped down at this point. Around twenty seconds after we park, here comes the red, white, and blue of the siren.
We hear a car door slam, then a loud knock on the back window. John Deere has a gun in one hand and a badge in the other. He’s telling me to get out of the car. My lips still smell like Filet-O-Fish.
“Only you,” he says to me. “You going to jail tonight.” He’s got the gun to my chest.
“Fuck you,” I tell him and suck my teeth. “I ain’t going nowhere.”
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Cleta is up front trying to reason with the man through her window when all of a sudden, in a scene straight out of Boyz N the Hood, a black cop approaches the car and accuses us of doing something wrong. Minutes later, a white cop tells us that John Deere has been drinking too much, and he lets us go.
Sixteen months later, I’m eighteen, three years older than Edward Evans will be when he is shot in the head behind an abandoned home in Jackson in 2012.
Shonda and I are walking from Subway back to Millsaps College with two of her white friends. It’s nighttime. We turn off of North State Street and walk halfway past the cemetery when a red Corolla filled with black boys stops in front of us. All of the boys have blue rags covering their noses and mouths. One of the boys, a kid at least two years younger than me with the birdest of bird chests, gets out of the car clutching a shiny silver gun.
He comes toward Shonda and me.
“Me,” I say to him. “Me. Me.” I hold my hands up, encouraging him to do whatever he needs to do. If he shoots me, well, I guess bullets enter and hopefully exit my chest, but if he thinks I’m getting pistol-whupped in front of a cemetery and my girlfriend off of State Street, I’m convinced I’m going to take the gun and beat him into a burnt cinnamon roll.